Mostly Maps

Maps, Geospatial and Occasionally Technology, but Mostly Maps

When I was a lot younger than I am now I learned the address of where I was growing up. More about that in a moment. First I want to mention what I didn’t learn. I didn’t learn that I was at TQ 23210 65789. Nor did I learn that I lived at 51.377792, -0.23107184. […]

CartoBot is a small robot who lives in the office in my loft. He accidentally achieved consciousness when his charging cable was accidentally plugged into a Raspberry PI and he started to look for information. His only source was my library of books on maps and so CartoBot became obsessed with them. He now spends […]

Quick, take a look at this map. There’s something wrong with it. It’s a map of the coast of West Africa dating from 1839. Compared with modern maps, a few things have changed. Senegambia was the French controlled Senegal and the British controlled Gambia, Soudan is today’s Sudan and Upper Guinea is part of today’s […]

In 2014 I made some GeoHipster predictions for the then coming year for the geo industry. As far as crystal ball gazing is concerned I didn’t think I did too badly, though some people disagreed. This year GeoHipster has done it again and I’ve made some more predictions. The whole list of predictions is online […]

At the beginning of 2013 Google launched Google Maps Engine Lite, a simpler and easier to use version of their commercial Maps Engine, which was designed as a successor to Google’s My Maps feature. In essence, My Maps and GME were web based, simplified GIS tools, allowing a user to create maps with overlays of […]

In January of 2014, Atanas Entchev from GeoHipster asked me to make some predictions about where the maps, location and geo industry would go during the course of the year. That year has now passed, so I think it’s time to revisit those predictions and see how inaccurate my crystal ball gazing really was. Raster […]

I don’t grow my own organic vertices. Nor do I use gluten-free technology. At least not that I’m aware. But I have been known to geocode by hand, in small batches and I do follow the @geohipster Twitter account. According to a new map put together by Ralph Straumann, that’s enough to make me a #geohipster.

It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these posts, in fact it’s been almost a year. A lot has happened since December of 2013, when I wrote “Who knows precisely where 2014 will take me?“. To be more precise, this is where 2014 took me …

Not all Geographic Information conferences are created equal. A great proof point for this is IRLOGI, the Irish Association for Geographic Information. Today I’ve been in Dublin at their annual GIS Ireland 2014 conference, which is in its 19th year. I’d been invited to give one of the opening keynotes; who could resist such an invitation?

Last weekend, myself and the rest of the OpenCage team were in Karlsruhe in Germany for the second annual OpenStreetMap State of the Map Europe conference. It was probably one of the best run and most diverse OSM conferences I’ve been to.

For a start the key essential elements for a conference were there; there was plentiful coffee and the wifi was both fast and more importantly, it didn’t die horribly during the conference.

I’d submitted a talk called Geocoding – The Missing Link For OSM? and had been asked to actually give that talk. That was my reason for being at SOTM-EU. But we were also going to soft launch OpenCage Data’s latest offering, a geocoding API that’s powered by OSM and other Open Data and which is built using open source commodity components. That’s the reason Ed and Marc Tobias were also in Karlsruhe.